World Boogie Is Coming

On the inner groove of Beale Street Saturday Night, amongst the various engravings that exist on old LPs, are four words in quotations: "WORLD BOOGIE IS COMING." This was a saying of Jim Dickinson's, who died on Saturday. His contribution to American music puts him in the company of men like his mentor Sam Phillips, about whom he said: "...God created all men equal. I think God gave Sam just a little extra." The same could be said about him.

I never met Dickinson, and always just took it for granted that someday I would. I saw him play a few times in intimate surroundings here in New York: first at the Lakeside Lounge, accompanied by Eric Ambel (who wrote a fine tribute to Dickinson HERE) and again at Joe's Pub a few years later. Sometime in the late 90s, I was in Memphis, and went to meet writer Robert Gordon for lunch at a midtown deli. As we sat there eating our sandwiches, Robert looked up and out the window. "Is that Dickinson?" he said. He paused for a moment, as we watched him amble across the street and past us. "He must be coming from the bank...Dickinson takes care of a lot of things, but himself is not one of them."

Apparently, there was a lot of truth to that statement. He loved the Bar-B-Q--maybe a little too much-- and earlier this year Dickinson underwent heart surgery, and never made a full recovery.

In Gordon's book It Came From Memphis, Dickinson recalls his early education in suburban Memphis:

"Everybody learned it from the yardman." says Dickinson. "Alex Tiel taught me everything he thought was important to teach a nine-year-old white boy. How to shoot craps, how to throw a knife underhanded--the important lessons in life. When it came to something he didn't know, he brought in an expert. He wasn't a musician, but he sang as he worked, unaccompanied, and when he realized I was interested in music, he brought in a man who taught me this technique that I learned to play from."

And so Dickinson's piano lessons began.

James Luther Dickinson went on to play in numerous bands in Memphis. In 1969, when the Rolling Stones were recording in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, he went down to hang out, and ended up playing piano on "Wild Horses" --apparently Stu couldn't play minor chords on the piano--he was also present and (probably) helped with the arrangement of their version of Mississippi Fred McDowell's "You Got To Move" which was also recorded that day. In the early seventies, with a group of fellow Memphians--The Dixie Flyers-- he went to Miami, as the backing band for countless Atlantic Record sessions; played on and produced Ry Cooder's first records, and later a handful of soundtracks (including Paris, Texas); recorded his own record, the classic Dixie Fried in 1972, following it up late in life with a string of great solo LPs. As a producer, he worked with Alex Chilton as a solo artist, and helped craft the collection of songs known as Big Star's Third. Later, he produced The Replacements, Toots Hibbert, Green on Red, Chuck Prophet, Amy LaVere, and many others including his sons, The North Mississippi All-Stars. In 1997, he played keyboards on Bob Dylan's Time Out of Mind, and when Dylan received a Grammy for the record, he thanked his "Brother," Jim Dickinson. His accomplishments are far and wide, and it's doubtful there will ever be anyone quite like him again. The world is a different place, and a better place for him having been a part of it.

Flags in Fluville are flying at half-mast.









Download:

Beale Street Saturday Night, 1978.
out of print

TELL ME MR. JOHNNY,
IS YOU GOT MY MONEY?
or
BOOLA BOOLA
liner notes by Stanley Booth


Both sides of this LP are presented in their entirety,
they are long continuous tracks.

Side One: mp3
Side Two: mp3




***************

Here are some of Dickinson's great recordings, as a frontman, multi-instrumentalist sideman, producer, arranger, and recording artist. This is really just the tip of the iceberg.

"You'll Do It All The Time" mp3
by Jim Dickinson And The New Beale Street Sheiks, 1964.
available on It Came from Memphis, Vol. 2

"Cadillac Man" mp3
by the Jesters, 1966.
available on Sun Records 50th Anniversary Collection

"Back For More" mp3
by Lawson & Four More, 1966.
available on It Came from Memphis, Vol. 2

"Uptight Tonight" mp3
by Flash And The Memphis Casuals, 1966.
available on It Came from Memphis

"Where Is The D.A.R. When You Really Need Him" mp3
by Jerry Jeff Walker, 1970.
with the Dixie Flyers
available on Bein' Free

"Your Own Backyard" mp3
by Dion, 1970
with the Dixie Flyers
available on King of the New York Streets

"Have You Seen My Baby?" mp3
by the Flamin Groovies, 1971.
available on Teenage Head

"Boomer's Story" mp3
by Ry Cooder, 1972.
available on Boomer's Story

"Casey Jones (On The Road Again)" mp3
by James Luther Dickinson, 1972.
available on Dixie Fried

"Kangaroo" mp3
by Big Star, 1975.
available on Third/Sister Lovers

"Fight At The Table" mp3
by Chris Bell, 1975.
available on I Am the Cosmos

"Rock Hard" mp3
by Alex Chilton, 1979.
available on Like Flies on Sherbert

"Red Headed Woman" mp3
by Jimmy Dickinson & The Cramps, 1984.
available on Rockabilly Psychosis and the Garage Disease

"Tina, The Go-Go Queen" mp3
by Tav Falco's Panther Burns, 1985.
available on Sugar Ditch Revisited

"Tossin' N' Turnin'" mp3
by The Replacements, 1987.
available on Pleased to Meet Me

"Hard To Handle" mp3
by Toots Hibbert, 1987
available on Toots in Memphis

"Power To The People" mp3
by Mud Boy & The Neutrons, 1993.
available on They Walk Among Us

"Dirt Road Blues" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1997.
available on Time Out of Mind

"JC's NYC Blues" mp3
by James Luther Dickinson, 2002.
available on Free Beer Tomorrow

"Somewhere Down The Road" mp3
by James Luther Dickinson, 2006.
available on Jungle Jim and the Voodoo Tiger

more on Jim Dickinson at The Hound Blog

Elvis Museum

As the rest of the world celebrates the 40th anniversary of Woodstock, today we'll do as we always do here in Fluville on August 16th, and pay tribute to the passing of the King. Elvis Presley died 32 years ago today, and his legacy has been enshrined by the almighty Elvis Presley Enterprises, making his former home, Graceland, one of the biggest tourist attractions in the USA.

There are also some smaller fan based attractions like Graceland Too, in Holly Springs, Mississippi, pictured above and run by tireless fan, Paul McLeod, who has turned his home into a museum and shrine to the King-- covering nearly every square inch of his home with memorabilia; the more campy 24 Hour Church of Elvis, in Portland, Oregon; and a nameless place, sweetly remembered in today's musical selection: "Elvis Museum," by Brooklyn's Maynard and the Musties.

Joe Maynard recalls the inspiration for the song:

"When I was 12 or so and spent the summer at my Dad's house in Lebanon, Tennessee, about 20 miles east of Nashville, he got a country club membership so we could go swimming. The bike ride was about 3 or 4 miles past the edge of town where it just started to turn into farms. About a 1/2 mile from the gate to the country club was this Elvis museum. They had a regular farm house, but as the song says, to the side was an airstream trailor and a billboard of sorts over the top. Everyone in the South waves at each other, and after a couple trips we just decided to check it out. I think she charged us 50 cents a piece, or a dollar. I don't remember much of what was inside, to tell you the truth... I just made up what I thought was in there for the song (sorry if it spoils it for anyone!)"

Long live the King.


Download:

"Elvis Museum" mp3
by Maynard and the Musties, 2009.
available on So Many Funerals

Ryan Adams plays piano and lapsteel

top photo: Graceland Too, Holly Springs, Mississippi, 1997.
© Ted Barron

Mississippi Fred McDowell

by Pete Simonelli

Mississippi Fred McDowell: Live at the Gaslight
Recorded: November 5th, 1971, New York City

Several years, and many miles, after his discovery by the great (and sometimes controversial) Blues musicologist, Alan Lomax, Mississippi Fred McDowell’s two sets this night in New York City proved to be the culmination of a long and rich career.

Born in Rossville, Tennessee, McDowell settled in Como, Mississippi in the early 40s, working as a plowman and cultivating his distinct style of slide guitar in local picnics and dances in the region known as The Hills: an area just north of the Mississippi Delta, noted for its own brand of Blues that hewed closer to the African tradition of repetitive rhythms, or “vamps.” He was taught to play slide guitar by an uncle, gradually using a beef rib bone before turning to a pocket knife and, later, as his style and gift were fully developed, a more common glass side he wore on his ring finger. Lomax arrived in 1959 and found McDowell and his wife on their porch, “looking like a couple of hungry blackbirds.” A questionable allusion today, but Lomax said Fred was, understandably, “eager to record.” In his highly acclaimed book, The Land Where the Blues Began, Lomax continues, “We recorded outdoors after dark, by flashlight. No wind was blowing, and the katydids were out of season, so we could take advantage of the living quiet of open air and the natural resonance of the earth and the trees….The sound we captured made us all deliriously happy.”

That same kind of sensation comes across in the intimate setting of the Gaslight. Greeted by an eager and excitable crowd, McDowell takes that energy and works off it throughout the entire recording. People gleefully heckle and cheer him on, entirely in love with him. It goes on like this throughout the show, McDowell being a consummate showman and kindly host, peppering his tuning breaks with explanations of how the Blues, “and Spirituals, too”, are conveyed to him and thus onto his listeners. He never flaunts his authority over the music, never condescends or rhapsodizes the crowd with hollow banter. Instead, he relies on a convivial and sympathetic approach. And as the songs unfold in alternating bouts of grief and redemption, sorrow and joy, the easy, fluid mastery of his playing--- and by extension, his personality--- is undeniable.

Given the palpable sweat and heat that reaches out of this recording, you’d never think that winter was fast approaching outside the Gaslight that night. But it was in fact an approaching cold that would settle over the world when, just a few short months later, Fred McDowell would die of cancer in 1972. Listening to these songs, accompanied by the late Tom Pomposello on bass (who also provides the liner notes and some fond, insightful memories to the collection), is an intimate and sometimes chilling experience when considering the proximity of McDowell’s death. He never recorded again, and to hear these songs unfold is easily one of the greatest listening pleasures any music lover could have. It’s not essential to be a fan of the Blues; this music resonates with such force and authenticity it would be hard not to feel instantly moved by McDowell’s singular ability to make his music stand out and be heard. As he so often said, the Blues “is a feeling, you understand,” and to hear his playing is to understand and capture not only the root of Blues music but what music in general can do for the soul of the listener.

A lofty sentiment perhaps. But if you go straight to the end (yes, straight to the end) of this double CD set, to “Get Right Church”, I think you’ll see what I mean. Granted, it is a haunting number that could unsettle the fainter heart, but the virtuosity of the playing and how McDowell’s plaintive voice combines with the hair-raising, get-right-to-the-bottom-of-the-well tone of his guitar is something beyond explanation. I’ve listened to this song repeatedly for years and my addiction to it is hopeless. I take to it like a dog to an ass scratch; all physical surroundings are lost; I succumb to the feeling.

When the song ends I turn around and play it again, thinking the only approximation to this kind of performance can be found in the likes of Son House or Skip James (each of whom are welcome inspirations to McDowell). There’s an ethereal, transcendent quality to the performance. Pomposello holds a grinding rhythm as McDowell luxuriates over the top of it, sometimes falling in with the bass line for a beat or two before he winds out of it and lets the guitar punctuate and/or finish the lyric. Many bluesmen---from Blind Lemon Jefferson, Charley Patton, Sleepy John Estes on down---substitute notes for the voice and finish a lyric; I realize it’s nothing new. But to hear it so closely (due to the great mastering of the recording) and with such acoustic density is truly akin to watching the show along with all the other fortunate folks who were there that night. You just have to close your eyes.

Another notable song, “Red Cross Store”, can also be found on the second of the two CD’s (track no.7). To call this number anything other than an indictment would be wrong. Even more so, this particular take is a variation on the original lyrics. Instead of a man taken to task by a woman, McDowell counters that idiom with a stirring version about a man looking to feed his family. Encountering the sheer rejectionof an otherwise charitable organization--- “Go ‘way, boy, you know times got hard.”--- the song veers between an urgency and a telling narrative built on the era’s social injustice that isn’t found too often in McDowell’s catalogue. Though the driving rhythm is a signature style and serves up much of the tune’s anger, a resentful McDowell tells us from the outset: “Well I ain’t!/ gwine back!/ to that!/ Red Cross!!/ store no more // ain’t gon/ na let my baby go back (to that) Red Cross/ store no more.” This is the verse that gets me, the opener, because you know something’s terribly wrong (the delivery tells us as much) and he’s not having it. When followed by the vow that he won’t let his baby go back either, I hear the conviction of a loving and righteous soul who won’t let anyone else suffer the way he already has.

By the third and fourth verses he’s laid out the story for us: boll weevils in the meat, (corn) meal, and lard, and there’s absolutely nothing to show for anybody’s work. The very people who have tended to the food--- sowed it, reaped it, and slaughtered it--- are suddenly told that it’s not available to them; it’s tainted, and there’s not a damned thing anybody’s going to do about it. The Blues, indeed.

On a lighter note, listen for something really cool at the very opening of the song. After a short tuning, McDowell slowly, almost cautiously, begins the song, letting it find its swing. Just as it starts to ramp up, a woman in the audience cuts loose and screams right into the song. It sounds like she’s launching it to fruition, and it’s the kind of enthusiasm that makes any great set a little more memorable. I sometimes go back to “Red Cross Store” just so I can hear her again.

This is standard-bearing work and shows us an artist, poet and farmer in one of his finest hours. Lomax would go on to lament Fred’s preference for electric Blues, believing that he’d lost one of his golden boys to the bright lights and flashy suits, but there’s really nothing lost at all. The porch is just New York City now.

Download:

“Get Right Church” mp3
"Red Cross Store" mp3
"Someday Baby" mp3
"When The Saints Go Marchin' In" mp3
"You Got To Move" mp3

by Mississippi Fred McDowell, 1971.
available on Live at the Gaslight

this photograph:
by William Eggleston,
Untitled, 1972.

top photograph:
by Lee Friedlander
Fred McDowell, Senatobia, Mississippi, 1960.

Billy Lee Riley Needs Your Help

This notice originally appeared on the Rockabilly Hall of Fame site:

Billy Lee Riley, one of the remaining original Sun Records artists is in VERY bad need of help! Billy has had his share of health problems, and is now battling Stage FOUR bone cancer.

Although MusiCares is helping with house payment, car and such, He and Joyce are totally out of money and can barely afford to eat. This is a CALL FOR HELP to all musicians and fans. Please remember, twenty bucks from all of us would make a HUGE difference in Billy's life! What if this was you? Let's all get together and send something today to Billy and Joyce and show them that he means alot to us. If you have a website, a facebook or myspace, please post this need for help on it! We can't save the world, but it will mean alot in Billy Lee's life!

His Address is:

Billy Lee Riley
723 Crest Drive
Jonesboro, Arkansas 72401

Or Donate via PayPal to bob@rockabillyhall.com

Download:

"Flying Saucers Rock n' Roll" mp3
by Billy Lee Riley, 1957.
available on Red Hot: The Best of Billy Lee Riley

"Red Hot" mp3
by Billy Lee Riley, 1957.
available on Red Hot: The Best of Billy Lee Riley

"Wouldn't You Know" mp3
by Billy Lee Riley, 1958.
available on Red Hot: The Best of Billy Lee Riley

via The Hound Blog

Freedom

Download:

"Freedom" mp3
by Alan Vega, Alex Chilton, Ben Vaughn, 1996.
available on Cubist Blues

"Freedom Part 1" mp3
by Charles Mingus, 1962.
available on The Complete Town Hall Concert

"Freedom Part 2 (Clark in the Dark)" mp3
by Charles Mingus, 1962
available on The Complete Town Hall Concert




"Freedom Blues" mp3
by Little Richard, 1971.
available on Rill Thing

"Freedom Train" mp3
by James Carr, 1969.
available on The Complete Goldwax Singles

"Freedom Street" mp3
by Ken Boothe, 1971.
available on Freedom Street

"Everytime I Think of Freedom" mp3
by Karen Dalton, 1962.
available on Cotton Eyed Joe

"Chimes of Freedom" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1964.
available on Another Side of Bob Dylan

top photo: © Ted Barron
Washington Square, New York City, 1984.

Body and Soul

by Chris O' Leary

It’s the first and only record I ever heard of that all the squares dig as well as the jazz people, and I don’t understand how and why, because I was making notes all the way. I wasn’t making a melody for the squares.

-Coleman Hawkins

“Body and Soul,” jazz standard of standards, turns eighty years old in 2010. It is jazz’s benchmark, warhorse, rite of passage, litmus test: I can’t think of a single major jazz musician, post-1930, who hasn’t taken it on, from Roy Eldridge to John Coltrane to Anthony Braxton, from Billie Holiday to Sarah Vaughan to Betty Carter, from Art Tatum to Thelonious Monk to Sun Ra. The fecundity, the sheer number, of its interpretations is staggering--in 1980 Gary Giddins estimated that some 3,000 versions of “Body and Soul” had been recorded, and likely at least a thousand more have come in the decades since.

Still, “Body and Soul” is a strange breed of eternal. It’s an odd song, with a melodramatic, sometimes clunky lyric (“my life a wreck you’re making”), a steeplechase harmonic structure with a wide range and a knotted string of key changes (the bridge alone is dizzying, starting a half-step above the home key of D-flat major, then dropping to a half-step below before it wends its way back to the chorus), and a ghost of a melody which sounds upon hearing it that you’ve dreamt it somewhere first.

The 22-year-old composer Johnny Green debuted the song in a 1930 Broadway show called “Three’s a Crowd”. The producers at first considered “Body and Soul” a dud, cutting it from a few tryout performances, while Robert Sour and Edward Heyman dashed out a series of lyrics in a bid to resuscitate it. (Frank Eyton, an arranger at the song publisher Chappell & Co., is also credited as a songwriter, though he’s there mainly for business reasons.) The final lyric, including the soon-to-be-altered line “my life a hell you’re making,” even got the song banned from a few radio stations in the early ‘30s.

Libby Holman made “Body and Soul” famous in “Three’s a Crowd” and the song’s dark, obsessive sentiments seem keyed to Holman’s brutal pageant of a life. A stage singer with a taste for younger women and men (including Montgomery Clift), Holman may have killed her husband, an heir to the Reynolds tobacco fortune. She first claimed he shot himself, and later that she had been so drunk she didn’t remember anything; she was indicted for murder but skipped sentencing because she was pregnant. After another of her husbands killed himself with barbiturates, she toured the world, sponsored Martin Luther King’s trip to India and befriended and bedded, respectively, Paul and Jane Bowles. One day in June 1971 her servants found her slumped in the front seat of her Rolls Royce, dead of carbon monoxide poisoning.

Holman’s recording of “Body and Soul” was one of many first-wave versions rushed out during the last months of 1930, along with those from flapper singer Annette Hanshaw and Paul Whiteman’s and Ozzie Nelson (Ricky’s father)’s big bands. Louis Armstrong’s take, cut at the same time, was released two years later, where it served as the first of many revivals of the song. The Benny Goodman Trio’s elegant version from 1935 did the same.

Making Notes All the Way

It’s possible that “Body and Soul” would have faded over time, in the way Johnny Green’s other standards like “Out of Nowhere” did, into a cult song occasionally dusted off by an enterprising jazzman. And then on 11 October 1939 Coleman Hawkins reincarnated “Body and Soul” as a masterpiece of pure improvisation.



"Body and Soul" mp3
by Coleman Hawkins, 1939.
available on Body and Soul: The Complete Victor Recordings 1939-1956 Master Tapes

Hawkins’ version is a two-chorus tenor saxophone improvisation that discards the original melody after the first few bars, and some 100,000 copies of it sold in the first six months of its release. Hawkins recorded it in one take, having come into the studio after playing all night at the NYC club Kelly’s Stable. He later said doing ‘Body and Soul’ hadn’t even crossed his mind:

“That tune was the least of my ideas. There were other tunes I preferred…when I got back to America, maybe once in a while in the middle of the night I would play ‘Body and Soul.’ Every time I played it different and people seemed to like it enough.” Told that one of the label execs had heard him do “Body and Soul” live and wanted Hawkins to record it, Hawkins agreed to do one take. He took a swig of Cognac and told the pianist Gene Rogers to play an introduction. No rehearsal, no charts. Off he went. “I didn’t even have an arrangement on it,” Hawkins said. “I didn’t want to play it at all, so I just played it through once and made up the ending when I got to it. The ending, as it turned out, was one of the funniest things I ever played in my life. Like the way the horns came in on the last chord.” (From John Chilton’s The Song of the Hawk.)

The first time Hawkins heard his “Body and Soul,” on a jukebox in Harlem’s Fat Man Charlie Turner’s Rib Place, he was surprised at how good it sounded. His contemporaries were stunned. Chu Berry told Hawkins he was playing “the wrong notes” on the record, while Thelonious Monk couldn’t grasp its appeal to squares and “old folks” (“I could understand if you played melody, because that’s what they like. [But] there’s no melody in there, what are they listening to?” he later told Hawkins). Nat King Cole dragged people into a dive bar on Central Avenue in Los Angeles to hear it on the jukebox. The young John Coltrane played the disc over and over, trying to figure out Hawkins’ arpeggios. Randy Weston tried to work it out on his piano, breaking the solo down note by note.

After Hawkins, “Body and Soul” had two lives. Subsequent generations of jazz players took Hawkins’ cue and used the genetic material of “Body and Soul” for their own ends, as the basis for a series of extravagant self portraits. Some of the finest include Jimmy Blanton’s 1940 take, a phenomenal bass solo that is first bowed and then, after a Duke Ellington piano interlude, plucked as if Blanton had adamantine fingers; Boyd Raeburn’s fusion--part Schoenberg, part Science Fiction movie soundtrack--from 1946; James Moody’s wistful dream, from 1949; Serge Chaloff’s baritone sax reverie, recorded while Chaloff was in a wheelchair due to spinal paralysis in 1955; Sonny Rollins’ a cappella bravado from 1958; Monk’s spiky, burrowing take from 1962, in which he seems to be trying to test the patience of the “old folks” that bewildered him years ago; John Coltrane’s stately version from 1960; Dexter Gordon’s multiple charges up the mountain. Hawkins himself recorded a tune called “Rainbow Mist” in 1944 which uses the same chord sequence of “Body and Soul”; it’s the closest he ever came to doing a sequel.



"Rainbow Mist" mp3
by Coleman Hawkins, 1944.
available on Rainbow Mist

The singers, however, kept up “Body and Soul”’s parallel existence, as a torch ballad that seems to disregard the basic rules of romantic songs. The singer doesn’t seem to really care about his or her lover except as an object of obsession—the singer is reduced to offering only physical release, and doesn’t seem concerned whether the lover responds in kind, saying only that they will keep up the pursuit until they’re satiated or something worse happens.

Its ominous, moonstruck sentiments were captured by singers like Sarah Vaughan, who recorded an elegant trio version in 1954, or Holiday, who took it on twice, a honeyed love song in 1940 (listen to how sweetly she sings a line like “my days have grown so lonely”), and a weary reminiscence in 1957, or Frank Sinatra, whose 1947 take offers the song in its purest form.

Why has “Body and Soul” captivated so many for so long? Perhaps it’s not as much of a mystery as it may appear. Musicians can’t get enough of that melody, and there’s so much bounty in Johnny Green’s elaborate composition that one can tap it for a long time without going dry. And perhaps it’s finally become a self-generating machine—the more the finest jazz players take it on, the more their ambitious successors try to best them at it. A fractured ray of moonlight, a stalker’s set of artless sentiments, “Body and Soul” has persisted far beyond the ambitions of its distracted makers. Listen to the tracks here, revel in them, and know that you’ve scarcely scratched the surface.

Download:

"Body and Soul" mp3
by Louis Armstrong, 1930.
available on The Big Band Sides 1930/32

"Body and Soul" mp3
by Benny Goodman Trio, 1935.
available on After You've Gone

"Body and Soul" mp3
by Django Reinhardt, 1937.
available on Django Rheinhardt Anthology 1934-1937



"Body and Soul" mp3
by Billie Holiday, 1940.
available on Lady Day: The Master Takes and Singles

"Body and Soul" mp3
by Duke Ellington and Jimmy Blanton, 1940.
available on Complete RCA Victor Recordings

"Body and Soul" mp3
by Charlie Parker, 1942.
guitar: Efferege Ware
available on Bird in Time 1940-1947

"Body and Soul" mp3
by Ben Webster, 1944.
available on Tenor Men: Titans of the Sax



"Body and Soul" mp3
by Roy Eldridge, 1944.
available on After You've Gone

"Body and Soul" mp3
by Lester Young, 1945.
available on The Complete Aladdin Recordings



"Body and Soul" mp3
by Boyd Raeburn, 1946.
vocal: Ginnie Powell
available on Boyd Meets Stravinsky

"Body and Soul" mp3
by Frank Sinatra, 1947.
available on A Voice in Time: 1939-1952

"Body and Soul" mp3
by Sarah Vaughan, 1954.
available on Swingin' Easy

"Body and Soul" mp3
Sonny Rollins, 1958.
available on Sonny Rollins and the Big Brass

"Body and Soul" mp3
by Charles Mingus, 1960.
available on Reincarnation of a Lovebird

"Body and Soul" mp3
by Eric Dolphy, 1960.
available on Candid Dolphy

"Body and Soul" mp3
by John Coltrane, 1960.
available on Coltrane's Sound

"Body and Soul" mp3
by Sun Ra, 1960.
available on Holiday for Soul Dance

"Body and Soul" mp3
by Thelonious Monk Quartet, 1962.
available on Monk's Dream

"Body and Soul" mp3
by Dexter Gordon, 1970.
available on The Panther!

"Body and Soul" mp3
by Anthony Braxton, 1974.
available on In the Tradition, Vol. 2

"Body and Soul" mp3
Charlie Haden, 1986.
available on Quartet West

**************************************
For more versions of the standard, visit the always formidable and awesome Locust Street. [ed.]

Weegee Speaks!

"It's like a modern Aladdin's lamp. You rub it--in this case, the camera-- you push the button and it gives you the things you want"

Today's mp3s come courtesy of my friend Laura Levine, fellow photographer, artist, and proprietor of Homer & Langley's Mystery Spot Antiques. Recently, Laura purchased a collection of 15,000 LPs to sell at the shop, and among them was this very rare and curious gem, Famous Photographers Tell How. Below you can hear Weegee talk about picture-making. It's interesting to hear his voice, which is one of those accents you don't hear so much in New York anymore: part Austro-Hungarian immigrant by way of the Lower East Side and part Elmer Fudd. Peter Sellers based his accent in Dr. Strangelove on Weegee's voice after Weegee visited Kubrick's set. One of my favorite things in Weegee's classic 1945 book, Naked City is the last chapter called "Camera Tips" where he gives away some of his tricks of the trade. Dated or not, I learned a tremendous amount when I first read it, about picture taking, and about Weegee.



Download:

"Weegee" mp3
by Weegee, 1958.
from Famous Photographers Tell How
out of print



"Now the easiest kind of a job was a murder, because the stiff would be laying on the ground. He couldn't get up and walk away and get tempermental and he would be good for at least two hours."

Arthur Fellig adopted the name Weegee or "Weegee the Famous," alluding to the Ouija board and his knack for being first on the scene is in his days as a roving news and street photographer. It wasn't an accident or any supernatural pre-disposition that he was there first at the fires, murders and general mayhem that he recorded in Gotham. Weegee was the first photographer to have a police scanner (originally in his one room tenement flat across the street from NYC police headquarters and later getting another for his Buick). His photographs of New York from the 30s and 40s are iconographic images of the city and it's inhabitants (both high and low) and important photographs, whether he intended them to be or not. It's been suggested that he was naive, and not a sophisticated photographer, but I don't really believe it, and it doesn't really matter. These pictures are as real as it gets, and great works of art. (see Atget) Later in his career, when he got the idea that he was an artiste is when the pictures became less interesting. (see Richard Avedon)



"I will walk many times with friends down the street and they'll say 'Hey, Weegee. Here's a drunk or two drunks laying on the gutter' I take one quick look at that and say 'They lack character.' So, even a drunk must be a masterpiece!"

A few weeks ago, my friend Chris was in town visiting and we spent part of an afternoon walking around downtown and looking at some of my old favorite places in the city. We came up through Chinatown, and on towards the old police headquarters on Centre Market Place. I told him "Weegee used to live right here, you know." We proceeded up the street, and looking for the John Jovino Gun Shop that had been there since at least the time of the Weegee (he lived upstairs) and I realized it was gone. I found out later that it actually moved around the corner, but something felt strange, like so much of this city that has disappeared in its post-Giuliani homogenization. I've been thinking about it a lot recently as I've been digging through my own archive of photographs that I made in my early days here in New York. I wonder what Weegee would think of the new niceness of his city. He didn't love the misery that the tenements that he grew up in bred - and no one should - but the drama and street theater of New York that he thrived on has been altered in ways that probably wouldn't please him.

Weegee was seltzer, sour pickles, and pastrami.





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BONUS:




Download:

"Henri Cartier-Bresson" mp3
by Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1958.
from Famous Photographers Tell How
out of print

Another segment from Famous Photographers Tell How with
Henri Cartier-Bresson. Eloquent, dry, and French like the great philosopher/mathematician image maker that he was.



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This record and thousands more, as well as interesting curios of old from near and far are available at Homer & Langley's Mystery Spot Antiques, located in downtown Phoenicia, New York. Tell 'em I sent you.